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Damsons, Preserved
Gather the damsons while the sun is on them, and when there has been no rain for twenty-four hours at least. They should be quite ripe, whole, and without blemish. To each jar, containing one quart of fruit, allow half a pound of good loaf sugar, and sprinkle it equally among the fruit in the jar, then set it in a vessel of cold water over a moderate fire and simmer, after it has come to a boil, fifty minutes, when the damsons will be soft, and must be allowed to get cold. Lose no time in completing the preserve. Untie the covers, and pour the juice into a preserving-pan, where it may boil fifteen minutes, and must then be strained over the fruit. Fasten down when cool, and store in a dry cool place.
A water-bath preserve in light syrup rather than a jam: the sugar here is far too little to preserve on its own, so everything depends on heat and on a sound seal. A few of the period's assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: heat, then seal, without a gapDamsons are acid enough that the danger is mould and fermentation rather than anything worse, but the original seals the jars cold after pouring in reboiled juice, which gives no vacuum. If you want jars that keep on a shelf, fill hot and process by a current tested water-bath method; otherwise treat the result as a refrigerator preserve and eat it within a few weeks.
- "A vessel of cold water over a moderate fire"This is a water bath. The jars go into cold water and heat with it so they do not crack, and they need a rack or folded cloth underneath so they are not sitting on the hot metal base. Water should come well up the sides.
- Fifty minutesTimed from the boil, and long by modern standards because the aim is to soften whole stone fruit through, not merely to sterilise. The damsons will collapse somewhat and the skins will split; that is expected.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, formerly sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute.
- The proportionsHalf a pound of sugar to a quart jar of fruit is roughly a cup of sugar per litre — a light syrup, sweet enough to balance damsons' sharpness but nowhere near preserving strength. Do not expect a set.
- "Untie the covers"Victorian jars were closed with a bladder, oiled paper or parchment tied down with string, which is why the covers can be untied and refastened. Modern two-piece lids or clip-top jars with new rubbers behave differently and should be sealed hot.
- StonesDamsons cling hard to their stones and the fruit is preserved whole here, stones included. Warn anyone at the table.
- Picking dry fruitThe instruction to gather in sunshine after twenty-four hours without rain is sound: surface water dilutes the syrup and carries yeasts and mould spores. Sound, unsplit fruit only.
- YieldA quart jar of damsons is on the order of a pound and a half of fruit, enough for a few servings as a dessert fruit with cream or roughly a pie's worth, though the recipe gives no yield.
The damson takes its name from Damascus — damascene, the plum of Damascus — and is generally traced to the eastern Mediterranean, reaching Britain early enough to have become, by the nineteenth century, a thoroughly English hedgerow and cottage-orchard fruit, with Shropshire and the Lyth Valley in Westmorland the best-known growing districts. Too sharp and too small to be much of a dessert plum, it earned its keep in the still-room: jam, damson cheese, damson gin, and bottled fruit like this. The method here is the plainest kind of bottling rather than the jam-maker's art — fruit held whole in a light syrup, kept by heat and a close cover instead of by a heavy weight of sugar.